Vitalik Buterin: Fan of Bitcoin’s Innovative Tech but Not of its Energy Consumption

During an interview for a podcast from Blockchain Insider – Vitalik Buterin, very respected and well known creator of Ethereum [ETH – third largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization], added his comments on the functionality and future of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Mr. Buterin praises the leading network’s innovative technology but highlights it having weak-points if set toe-to-toe with PoS. This comes, according to him, due to the level of energy consumption that the network requires to clear transactions as requested.

“These two mechanisms are kind of similar because they both use economic resources to gatekeep what level of participation you can have in the network. And that’s something which is necessary because if you don’t have that kind of economic gatekeeping, then one participant can just pretend to be a billion fake participants and then take over the entire network. And Proof of Work does that. Proof of Stake does that, in our opinion, better for a couple of reasons.”

Continued comparing PoW and PoS

One of them is that with Proof of Work, in order to prove that you actually have this computing power, you have to basically turn on these computers and have them solve mathematical puzzles 24/7. And this leads to huge amounts of energy consumption. I think Bitcoin is at the point of exceeding probably the majority of the world’s countries’. And Ethereum is definitely not nearly at that point, but it’s still much higher than I would like it to be.

And Proof of Stake is much more efficient because, instead of proving that you have computers by using them 24/7, to prove that you have coins, you just need to basically sign a digital signature with the same cryptographic key that has those coins. And so the network can run with much lower energy consumption to the point where the main thing that you’re wasting is just the fact you have these 10,000 nodes that all need to verify every transaction, which is much less.”

Moving over to Vitalik Buterin’s official twitter handle, when asked about Bitcoin [BSV] he replied that despite standing in disagreement with the set-roadmap, the aforementioned flaws that PoW showcases – its genuinely cool tech.

Yeah no, I have my disagreements with the bitcoin roadmap, PoW, etc but they're trying to do something that's genuinely cool tech. BSV is a pure dumpster fire.

About author

Alex Tomzack is a crypto-enthusiast and has been fascinated since first hearing about it. Loves technology, writing, culture while being a regular trader and holder of digital assets.
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